Annual Report of the Publications Board
For the Period July 1, 2007– June 30, 2008
Submitted by: Ronald F. Boisvert and Holly Rushmeier, Co-Chairs
Date of Report: August 28, 2008
1. Basic Information
A. Members of the Board
Gul Agha (UIUC)
Michel Beaudouin-Lafon
(U Paris-Sud)
Ronald Boisvert (NIST)
Ricardo Baeza-Yates
(Yahoo!, Barcelona, Spain &
Santiago, Chile)
Nikil Dutt (UC Irvine)
Carol Hutchins (NYU)
Mary Jane Irwin (PSU)
Ee-Peng Lim (SMU, Singapore)
Jack Davidson (U Virginia)
M. Tamer Ozsu (U Waterloo)
Holly Rushmeier (Yale)
Vincent Shen (UST, Hong Kong)
Mary Lou Soffa (U Virginia)
Original appointment: 5/15/03 – 6/30/06
Reappointed 7/01/06 – 6/30/09
Original appointment: 1/1/02 - 12/31/04
Reappointed: 1/1/05 – 12/31/08
Original appointment: 7/1/97 – 6/30/00
Vice Chair for Electronic Publishing: 5/8/00–
Reappointed: 7/1/00 – 6/30/03
Reappointed: 7/01/03 – 6/30/06
Co-Chair: 1/1/05 – 6/30/07
Reappointed Co-Chair 7/1/07 – 6/30/10
Original appointment: 1/1/07 – 12/31/09
Original appointment: 7/1/2008 – 6/30/2011
Original appointment: 1/1/97 – 12/31/02
Reappointed: 1/1/03 – 12/31/05
Term extended 1/1/06 – 12/31/06
Term extended 1/1/07 – 12/31/10
Original appointment: 5/01/02 – 4/30/05
Co-Chair: 1/1/ 05 – 6/30/07
Term as Member extended to 6/30/08
Original Appointment 1/1/07 – 12/31/09
SGB Liaison: 4/01/07 – 3/31/09
SGB Liaison: 12/01/02 – 11/30/04
Appointed regular member: 12/01/04 –
11/30/07
Appointed Vice Chair for new Publications,
7/1/07 -6/30/10
Original appointment: 2/1/03 – 1/31/06
Vice-Chair, New Publications: 2/1/03 – 6/30/07
Reappointed 2/01/06 – 1/31/09
Appointed Co-Chair of Board 7/1/07 – 6/30/10
Original appointment: 3/1/06 – 2/28/09
Original appointment: 2/15/05 – 2/14/08;
extended one year to 2/15/09
B. Standing Committees
The Publications Board itself is handling all the policy and planning issues that
used to be delegated to its standing committees, and has further delegated to the
staff the monitoring and tracking of business and financial operations.
Consequently the Standing Committees (Publications Planning Committee and
Publications Business Affairs Committee) are all vacant. Tamer Ozsu (7/1/07 –
6/30/10) is responsible for leading the Board effort in New Publications Planning
and Development.
C. Ad hoc Committees
Publications Board Information Director. Ron Boisvert continues to serve in
this role. Activities this year consisted of: working with HQ and Scholar One to
make improvements and adjustments to the manuscript tracking system;
providing advice to staff and volunteers on technical issues related to the Digital
Library; providing liaison between volunteer Information Directors and ACM
Staff; and informing new Editors-in-Chief and journal Information Directors
about their responsibilities with respect to journal web sites.
2. Strategic Vision
The Publication Board continues to work to make ACM the preferred publisher in
computing. On the Board’s view, this requires (a) continual improvements in the
experience for authors and readers, and (b) aggressive development of the highest
quality content and services within the ACM Digital Library and the associated Guide
to Computing Literature.
3. ACM Publications Portfolio
The centerpiece of the ACM Publications Portfolio is the ACM Digital Library and
its associated Guide to Computing Literature. As of June 30, 2008, there were more
than 253,000 full-text articles in the DL, and more than 1,196,000 bibliographic
citations in the Guide. During FY08 alone, nearly 18,000 articles were loaded in the
DL, and more than 86,000 citations were added to the Guide.
ACM is currently the publisher of 104 periodicals, including 7 journals, 30
transactions, 10 magazines, and 57 newsletters. In addition, it provides primary online
distribution for 10 additional periodicals through the ACM DL. During FY08, the
first issues of three new periodicals appeared:
o Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
o Transactions on Accessible Computing
o Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage
During FY08, ACM published 311 conference and related workshop proceedings,
including 69 in its ACM International Conference Proceedings Series.
4. Editors-In-Chief
EiC’s for new journals are appointed as part of the review and approval of new
journal proposals. EiCs serve for 3-year terms, with the possibility of a single
renewal. When there is a vacancy an ad hoc search committee is formed in
accordance with the Board’s appointment policy. In the past year SIGs have been
working actively with the Publications Board in forming these committees and
conducting the searches, much to the benefit of the ACM Journals and Transactions
involved.
The following Editors-in-Chief were appointed or reappointed this past year:
Massoud Pedram
(USC)
Marcello Federico
(Trento, Italy)
Hwee Tou Eng
(NU Singapore)
Meral Ozsoyoglu
(Case Western)
Pino Italiano
(U Roma, Italy)
Jaime Callan (CMU)
Susanne Albers
New Editors for Existing Journals
Transactions on Design Automation of
Electronic Systems (TODAES)
Transactions on Speech and Language
Processing (TSLP)
Transactions on Asian Language
Information Processing (TALIP)
Transactions on Database Systems
(TODS)
Journal of Experimental Algorithmics
(JEA)
Transactions on Information Systems
(TOIS)
Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
7/1/08 – 6/30/11
7/1/06 – 6/30/09
1/01/07 – 12/31/09
8/1/07-7/31/10
7/1/07-6/30/10
7/1/07 – 6/30/10
7/1/08 – 6/30/11
(U Freiburg, Germany)
Lance Fortnow
(Northwestern)
Giovanna Di Marzo
Serugendo
(U London, UK)
Ian Gladwell (SMU)
Jaiwei Han (UIUC)
New Journals
Transactions on Computation Theory
(TOCT)
Reappointments
Transactions on Autonomous and
Adaptive Systems (TAAS)
Transactions on Mathematical
Software (TOMS)
Transactions on Knowledge Discovery
from Data (TKDD)
1/1/08 – 12/31/10
1/01/08 – 12/31/10
1/1/08 – 12/31/10
1/1/08 – 12/31/10
The Board has developed a formal set of criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of
Journal EiCs and Editorial Boards. EiCs are given this document at the start of their
terms, and are asked to address these criteria in their bids for reappointment. See
http://www.acm.org/pubs/eic-criteria.html.
5. Summaries of Ongoing Projects
A. Journal Processing
Production: Turnaround time in production (from the time an issue is received by
HQ, until it appears in print) is now averaging six weeks. All journals for which
there is sufficient content are now on or ahead of schedule.
Editorial Pipeline: Most journals now have sufficient content for at least the next
two issues. There are two journals with little or no backlog, and HQ staff and the
Publications Board Co-Chairs are working with those Editors-in-Chief to address
the problems.
B. Online-First Publishing
In this initiative, we are changing ACM’s production model so that issues are put
into production and published in the ACM Digital Library as soon as the
manuscripts are ready, independent of the print distribution date. Print
distribution occurs on the traditional schedule, even though this may lag well
behind DL publication. The goal is to eliminate long publication queues.
Significant strides have been made here. For example, TOMS issues which will
see print distribution in March and June 2009 were published in the DL in July
2008. Also, a number of journals have all of their 2008 issues online as of June.
This initiative is still an intermediate step to eventually going to an “articles” first
publishing model, where accepted articles, rather than complete issues are loaded
into the DL as soon as they have been edited.
C. Manuscript Tracking
As of June 30, 2008, all but four ACM journals were online and functioning with
ScholarOne’s Manuscript Central system. The Publications Board has a matter of
policy insists that all journals use Manuscript Central. EiC appointments and
reappointments are contingent on EiC use of the system.
D. New Journals Development
In FY08, the Board approved one new ACM publication, the ACM Transactions
on Computation Theory. The proposal for the journal was developed by
SIGACT. According to its statement of scope, TOCT will cover “theoretical
computer science complementing the scope of the ACM Transactions on
Algorithms and the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic including, but not
limited to, computational complexity, foundations of cryptography, randomness
in computing, coding theory, models of computation including parallel,
distributed and quantum and other emerging models, computational learning
theory, theoretical computer science aspects of areas such as databases,
information retrieval, economic models and networks.” The founding EiC is
Lance Fortnow of Northwestern University. The first call for papers was issued in
February 2008. See http://toct.acm.org/.
Other actions related to publications included the following.
 Agreed to distribute a VLDB Foundation publication entitled VLDB
Proceedings in the ACM DL. ACM currently distributes the VLDB
Journal and conference proceedings.
 Approved in principle the change of scope of the SIGCSE Newsletter
Inroads, to a magazine-style publication.
The Board reviewed and subsequently rejected proposals for new journals in the
following topic areas.
o
o
o
o
o
o
Intelligent User Interfaces
Interdisciplinary Telecommunications Studies
Distributed and Networked Systems
Human-Robot Interaction
Chinese Journal on Software and Informatics
eLearning Technology and Methodology
The Board is currently considering proposals for journals in the areas of Social
Computing and Performance Evaluation.
E. Digital Library/Guide
This past year, the Board, working with HQ Staff, evaluated and provided input
on three major new DL initiatives.
o A new DL search engine with guided navigation capabilities powered by
Endeca.
o A new DL pricing model for academic consortia and corporations to be
rolled out in calendar 2009.
o Author Bibliographic Pages, which were unveiled in April of 2008.
Author Pages list all of an individual’s publications which are indexed by the
Guide, including relevant bibliometrics (e.g., number of citations, number of
downloads). Authors can configure the pages to provide certain types of personal
information, such as an image and a link to a personal homepage. The project has
been very successful. During the first two months of operation ACM received
feedback from more than 200 persons, almost uniformly positive. During that
period, more than 500 profiles were edited by authors, and more than 195,000
distinct author pages were visited, accounting for more than 1.3M views.
The Board continues to devote a significant amount of its time on the Digital
Library and Guide to Computing Literature, discussing strategic directions, and
content quality control (i.e., what literature should go into the Guide).
F. Other Initiatives
a) Plagiarism Monitoring.
o In FY 08, there were seven cases of plagiarism raised, including a
single proceedings with 9 of 44 submissions having plagiarized
previously published content. With the Publications Board Policy on
Plagiarism in place, the process of investigating and following up on
these claims has been much more efficient for both staff and the
volunteers involved. Of these cases, two were related to issues of selfplagiarism.
o The Board is working on an experiment with SIGDA and HQ Staff to
see how effective a plagiarism-detection software package (DUDE)
can work in identifying multiple submissions of the same work to
different conferences.
o The Board continues to monitor developments with the Cross-Ref
program to develop a multi-publisher database of articles that will
facilitate plagiarism detection. ACM is participating in this initiative.
b) ACM Computing Classification System (CCS). The Board Appointed Gul
Agha as Chair of an ad hoc committee to update the CCS. The goal is to
reflect all of the recent changes in CS research areas and to better organize the
ACM content in the DL.
c) ISI Web of Science. ACM continues to work with ISI to ensure that ACM
publications are included in its citation index. During this year, TOCHI,
TISSEC, TOMACS, TOIS, and TOMCCAP were each accepted for inclusion.
In total, 18 ACM journals are now indexed there (nearly 50%.) ACM has
provided ISI with a ranking of its top 100 proceedings (based on downloads)
to aid them in selecting proceedings for review.
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